


Saccharine Smiles

by Pastango



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Heavy Ass Angst Holy Shit, Hurt No Comfort, I Made Myself Cry, Past Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, hh i'm in pain, some fluff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-12 22:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13557324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pastango/pseuds/Pastango
Summary: Shuichi remembers it all too well.





	Saccharine Smiles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luucarii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luucarii/gifts).



> i'm so sorry

Shuichi Saihara's emotions were complicated.  
The dreams came in scenes, slowly progressing from gentle to horrifyingly dark in a matter of minutes.

He remembers her face first, focused lavender eyes studying the black and white keys of a piano.  
Following this is the rest of the scene, a room, distinctly the lab of the Ultimate Pianist, Kaede Akamatsu.  
She's stunning, breathtaking, a million words to describe her, too many to fill a dictionary, and yet they all fit her.  
He watches her play, fingers dancing across the keys at a speed that suited her talent.  
The day carries on as she begins playing her next piece, [something that's familiar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X5-F36sDK0).

After this finishes, he ends up kissing her in the crimson sunset. The feeling of her lips pressing against his is familiar, despite it never happening before.  
He wanted it to stay like that.

It doesn't. It never does.

The scene changes all too quickly, too quickly to comprehend, to something the detective would never want to remember, but is forced to anyways.

Blood, still sticky and staining the library carpet a dark red, a shotput ball sitting nearby.  
A mess of green hair, stained the same sickening crimson, yet so terribly similar to the sky on that fateful night, on the corpse of Rantaro Amami.  
Killed by blunt force trauma. They're handed the Monokuma Files.  
He pretends not to notice the pianist flinch away. He pretends to ignore her stammered way of speaking. He pretends, and pretends, and yet it isn't enough.

They investigate, and yet his partner seems distracted by something unknown. He continues to lie to himself.

A lie cannot be true forever, a lesson he learned too quickly.

He continues lying anyways, throughout the entire class trial, and even afterwards.  
It's hard to convict someone you love of murder, and yet Shuichi has to.

The high-pitched and admittedly very annoying voice of Monokuma rings out, announcing the punishment time.  
They're holding eachother, both sobbing their eyes out.  
She reassures him that it'll be okay, she tried. She killed someone, and she deserves this.

The shadowed body, hanging from the rope, above the keys, is unsettling.  
Her sweater, once a beautiful pink, is ripped in various places, and her hands have slight bits of blood on them from when it dripped from her mouth onto them while she clutched her neck.  
The lid of the piano comes down too quickly, and she's gone forever.  
His knees shake, giving out, and despite knowing the astronaut punched him, he doesn't feel it.

  
That night, he wakes up with a yell. His two roommates, survivors themselves, are there to help him.  
It's okay, they say.  
It's like this every night.

It always has been.

 

_It's been a few months, now, and he can't forget that saccharine smile._


End file.
